Centralized UI settings

Since 7.1.05

Reason

In rare occasions it's necessarily to perform whole UI customization at one place for some reason, e.g. customer is using font which is installed to system, but not used by PIM.

Starting from 7.1.05 PIM supports this functionality through CSS themes.

Client property

Use com.heiler.ppm.main/path-to-css-customization-file client preference for pointing to concrete CSS theme.

How it works

Simply speaking: you specify the SWT class name and necessarily properties for it, for example:

Button background
Button { background-color: #FF0000 }

For sure, CSS allows you to do much more. See References for more details.

Problems

Sadly, but even CSS customization isn't a golden bullet since operating system can prohibit changing of colors and fonts for some UI elements.

Using above CSS will give this results for buttons:

images/download/attachments/75858548/fieldSelection.PNG

But this will be a concern only in rare cases, since 90% of requirements and problems could be covered with CSS usage.

Examples

Changing fonts for whole PIM client:

Global font
* { font-family: 'Broadway' }

Result:

images/download/attachments/75858548/fontChangedClient.png

Changing fonts only in tables:

Table font
QuasiVirtualTable { font-family: 'Broadway' }

Result:

images/download/attachments/75858548/fontChangedTable.png

Limitations

Due to a performance issue on loading of a large amount of table items the CSS support was disabled for the SWT class "TableItem".